How to protect yourself from a spam blogger targeting WordPress literary sites

If you write about books or literary topics on a WordPress.com blog, watch out for sploggers who may be stealing your posts. Sploggers are spam bloggers, people who “scrape” posts off your site (typically using the RSS feed) and post them on their own. They may then sell advertising against your posts, so they earn money from your work.

Worse, sploggers keep people from reaching your posts through search engines, because their URL appears on your posts instead of yours with no link. If this happens, you pay a double price: Your work is stolen and you lose the traffic you would have had if your work had appeared under its own URL on a search engine.

Any blogger can become the victim of splogger – the risk isn’t limited to literary or WordPress bloggers. But if you are both of those, you have a reason for extra caution right now.

Since August 12, my posts on One-Minute Book Reviews have been aggressively scraped by a Poland-based blog that claims to offer “books and reviews from all over wordpress.com.” The splogger appears also to be lifting text without linking from many WordPress blogs besides mine, including Stuff White People Like, which recently earned a widely publicized book contract for its creator.

I can’t link to the offending splog, which would send traffic to it. But if you’d like to get a sense of how the scam works, go to Technoratiwww.technorati.com and search for “Janice Harayda” (not “One-Minute Book Reviews”). Look at the URL for any of my post–Aug. 12 posts, such as those about the children’s books Read All About It! and Lyle, Lyle Crocodile. You will see that my URL oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com doesn’t appear on these posts (as on pre-August 12 posts) — the splogger’s URL appears with no link to my site. The splogger’s fake posts have preempted my real posts, so you can’t here from there.

This mess remains unresolved. But in trying to protect my work, I’ve found that you can fight sploggers. Here are some tips based on my experience or on ideas from WordPress Forums or Support:

1. Search for your site on Technorati and other blog search engines at least once a week, ideally every day. Use the “Contact” form on Technorati to report copyright violations or other abuse.

You may also want to:

2. Go to stolen.wordpress.com to report the abuse or learn more. WordPress may be able to provide an e-mail address for the host of the site if there’s no contact information on the splog, as there usually isn’t.

3. Send a “Cease and Desist” letter to the site if you can and, if not, to the host or a search engine that lists it. You can find sample letters for the different parties here: www.plagiarismtoday.com/stock-letters/.

5. Get in touch with support@wordpress.com if you are still having trouble.

6. If the splog has advertising from Google AdSense or another agency, use the contact information the agency’s site to report the abuse. To do this with AdSense, search the site for “Report a Policy Violation” www.google.com/adsense/.

7. Search the Internet for terms such as “fight sploggers” or “protect yourself against sploggers” for more ideas.